Blackboard Patent Invalidated By Appellate Court 142
Arguendo writes "A federal appeals court ruled Monday that Blackboard Inc.'s patent on a learning management system is invalid in light of the inventors' own prior software product. We have previously discussed the patent and Blackboard's trial court victory against Desire2Learn. It's not completely over, but this is almost certainly the death knell for Blackboard's patent. If so inclined, you may read the appellate court's decision here (PDF) or on scribd."
Woot! (Score:1)
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This does not qualify as patent trolling. Patent trolling is making/buying a patent that has no actual product behind it (or never making use of the product) and then hanging out hoping others would make a similar product and then sueing for profit. Blackberry has been using their product for years now and they are an industry leader in LMS technology.
Blackboard's "patents" are all based on prior art. Blackboard is nothing more than a database driven web site, and adds nothing novel or non-obvious. Most of their features exist in your basic blog sites. They are as much patent trolls as Amazon was for 1-click shopping.
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True. Neither Blackboard nor Amazon is a patent troll. They're both trying to enforce dubious patents, but neither is a troll since by definition a patent troll is an organization trying to profit from a patent that it does not use in any product.
Only the first po5t gets the patent (Score:1, Funny)
Desire2pwn
Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:5, Interesting)
Along with the patent examiners, of course.
If you look at the patents that Blackboard has, they basically make it *impossible* to have any kind of "intranet" site at an educational institution. Everything (almost literally everything) that you would want to have/do on a school's intranet, Blackboard has a patent for.
It's fucking ridiculous, and if their patents are invalidated, everyone in the education industry will RUN AWAY from their product, which sucks.
Re:Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, we did run away and for years my little college has been happily using a competitor's product... Until this last year when Bb bought them out.
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A brief explanation of that behavior, Admodieus:
I worked with Blackboard for awhile, although not directly for them, and this was mostly attributed to development flat-out refusing to even test compatibility with a beta product (Firefox 3 and IE8 come to mind from recent experience), since they didn't want to have to muck about with the code to get it to work, and then muck about with it even more when a given browser went from Beta to GA. As soon as any beta browser was made GA, development got to work on
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this was mostly attributed to development flat-out refusing to even test compatibility with a beta product (Firefox 3 and IE8 come to mind from recent experience), since they didn't want to have to muck about with the code to get it to work, and then muck about with it even more when a given browser went from Beta to GA.
Then they suck. That's how the game is played when you're a large company building a browser based application for wide release. They should have been testing on the alphas and betas, and ha
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I want to run away from their product even if the patents are not invalidated. They're all pieces of crap that rely heavily on Java applets and fail to support updates for browsers when they come out, like Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, etc.
I remember two years ago, there was a period of time where they told users not to upgrade to Firefox 2 or IE7 because they didn't have support lined up for them yet.
Amen. And their latest incarnation (at least, the latest that FSU is using) is so bloated that the computers at my testing center (not bleeding edge, but not 10 years old either) end up thrashing so hard that it takes me 45 seconds between typing and having it show up on the screen.
It makes the exams for my upcoming "Statistics For Scientists/Engineers" scare me even more than the class itself does...
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*sobs* And I still have 14 credits to go.
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Is it used in education? Then yes.
Re:Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly, we went for Angel, which has been bought out by BB so we need to do another switch. BB will be among the possible options we'll be putting out there for the committee, but given our previous miserable experience with them I'll be amazed if we pick it over either Moodle or Sakai.
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However, there have been plenty of good products ruined by shitty companies.
Re:Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:4, Informative)
If you're seriously considering replacement options, I'm the designer and developer for another LMS that is AICC/SCORM compatible (single-SCO courses at this time) and includes registration and tracking for classroom-based courses in addition to the online stuff. Communication is pretty much one-way though, the students don't have a way to submit materials to instructors. The feature set is purely customer-driven, every feature the LMS has is there because someone asked for it. Anyway, I'm currently adding features to version 7 of the LMS, which I redesigned and rewrote from the previous versions to run on a PHP/MySQL platform and make use of the ExtJS framework for the interface (so it's heavy on Javascript). Our largest client installation has just over 70,000 total users and about 54,000 active students, with 350,000 training records representing 177,000 hours of tracked training. So, if you're in a position to make recommendations, you can find our website at tracorp.com. The website is being redesigned and focuses almost entirely on courseware production as opposed to the LMS software, but you can contact us through the site if you want to schedule an LMS demo.
Re:Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah: we're also a small company that has no affiliation at all to Blackboard.
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TraCorp, I mentioned that our website was at tracorp.com.
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I suppose there's more than one reason that I'm in development rather than marketing, but thanks for asking.
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I can recommend Eben Moglen's keynote and the discussion with Matthew Small (2006 Sakai conference).
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+--+Eben+Moglen [sakaiproject.org]
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime+Discussion+with+Eben+Moglen+and+Matthew+Small [sakaiproject.org]
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Blackboard is a leading industry LMS provider - they are really good at what they do.
The above sentence contains two statements. One of these statements is true, and one is false. Please indicate which is which, and submit your answer.
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Blackboard is a leading industry LMS provider - they are really good at what they do.
The above sentence contains two statements. One of these statements is true, and one is false. Please indicate which is which, and submit your answer.
And in order to facilitate this, please enjoy this Java applet that will take 90 seconds to load and slow your computer into a state of perpetual thrash-lock so that we may present you with the two radio buttons for your answer.
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Second Blackboard is a leading industry LMS provider - they are really good at what they do.
Really good at convincing the powers that be to buy thier shitware and force it on us yes.
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Sakai and Moodle are options, but if your business plan involves volunteer labor or grant money, I think you might not have much of a market.
You know, I think you might be surprised how much more active Moodle gets if you send the money you were planning to spend on BB their way... ;)
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Allow me to support...
Let's take your points in order
IIt's easy to use (for students and professors),
I've used it as a professor. Perhaps I've been spoiled by using actually half-decent systems like Angel and Moodle, but IMHO it's a steaming pile of bad UI. Why is the professor interface totally different from the student one, to start with the most obvious UI abortion?
I've been using it for a few years now as a student. On the student side (just for one example), I have to wonder how a company that is "good" as what it does could possibly thing it is good design to have the "Select all messages" at the bottom of the window, and the "Mark as Read" at the top. Brilliant!
has virtually no downtime
You really aren't very familiar with BB, are you? I'll direct you to the dcollins post at the bottom of the page where CUNY got to experience multiple failures of BB. This is *not* unusual- spend any amount of time talking to BB users and you'll get to hear stories of how it collapsed the week before finals and BB's legendarily awful tech support sat around doing nothing.
More concisely: LOL!
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Blackboard had multiple major software/hardware failures at their own Virginia datacenter hosting Blackboard for schools on Blackboard's own
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I'm pretty neutral on it, honestly. I'm not for vigilantism and its inherent societal breakdown, but I'd have a hard time convicting someone like that guy from Texas [slashdot.org] who's being sued by patent trolls, apparently for no other reason than that he's from Texas, were he to take the law into his own hands.
Maybe Americans should start taking their democratic rights more seriously before blaming "the government" and "the Wall Street executives".
I'd say that's exactly what he'd be doing.
Hurry!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Yay. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully this will kill them, and force TPTB to get something that actually works.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hell, I've taken blackboard courses where you had to type in a friggin' license number from the back of the $125 paper-back textbook in order to have the "right" to read the "supplementary material" on the publisher's web site (that was required reading). The whole course was bought pre-packaged and plugged in to blackboard. Boy did it suck, too. Can't imagine what the prof in question was getting paid for.
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He was getting paid for making each student in his class buy a $125 product.
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Why on earth is it the default to hide coursenotes from students who are not enrolled on a particular course?
Perhaps because universities would like to prevent people from auditing courses that they didn't pay for.
Of course, you're right in that BB should have made it easier to set up document sharing between courses, but there are educational institutions that have a legitimate interest in preventing/limiting that behavior.
Reading web material is not auditing. (Score:2)
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If the university doesn't want you auditing a class you didn't pay for, then they won't let you log in to the system and/or see that class. This has nothing to do with typing a code from the text book. That is all at the publisher level.
The publishers provide universities with course packs called cartridges. I don't deal with blackboard directly, so these may or may not have a charge associated with them. Considering we are talking about blackboard they probably cost a pretty penny.
The publishers th
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I bought a used book once only to find out that you needed one of these activation codes to access the online content... meh. It didn't look like the online content was anything more than the text content in PDF.
Well, it turns out that all homework for that course was turned in via the website+activation code. And that the program it wanted me to use to do the homework didn't run on Macs.
I dropped that section of the course and enrolled with a teacher who had better taste in textbooks.
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As a Dutch student I have the right to follow any lecture at any university in the country. Due to Blackboard I cannot even access last years lecture notes of my own study, let alone those of any other study. Hell, I can't even look up the schedule.
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Perhaps because universities would like to prevent people from auditing courses that they didn't pay for.
Are you kidding me? It's called a "university" for a reason.
As a datum: at the university I attended (which, coincidentally, has produced several of the greatest polymaths in history), once you are at the university, you are permitted -- encouraged, even -- to attend any lecture courses that interest you or may assist you in your studies. (Of course, that doesn't apply to lab experiments or experimental coursework).
If you suggested to someone there that the university should start excluding students from co
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Have you posted this before in another discussion? I am having the wildest deja vu right now, right down to your sig.
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Moodle? (Score:2)
Hopefully this will kill them, and force TPTB to get something that actually works.
Have you had a look at Moodle [moodle.org]? I came across it the other day when I was evaluating Drupal for my website.
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Sigh.
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thanks! I'll check it out. There is also an IT stumbling block - the folks who implement Blackboard will be the ones to shuffle to Moodle, and given how entrenched Blackboard and all of its sucktasticness (sp?) in my school's IT managerial class, I don't know if I would even be allowed to use Moodle parallel to Blackboard, much less in place of...
Sigh.
We have both Blackboard and Moodle deployed at my employer. Well, let's be more accurate. We've outsourced the BB deployment to BB themselves, and I'm only aware of one (admittedly large) school using Moodle. BB is (according to my spies) slow, irritating and vastly expensive (as well as requiring extra file servers deployed by us to host "large" files like short videos) and the users of Moodle seem fairly satisfied with it.
For my teaching, I'm sticking to using plain old HTML and PDFs hosted in a normal we
Blackboard's patent (Score:3, Funny)
A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are...
lol.
Outstanding news... so far... (Score:3, Interesting)
Because, as most /. readers tend to believe, "information wants to be free", and the Blackboad patent was so directly a contravention of that idea that even their own case filings ignored the idea of courseware to focus on a single aspect -- allowing a student who is also a teacher in another role -- to use one login. Then they used a faulty decision in that court to target their competitor -- who made no infringing claim.
The appeal judges state "On the merits, we hold that those claims do not contain a âoesingle loginâ limitation and that the district courtâ(TM)s contrary interpretation of the claim language in its JMOL ruling was error" (I think they meant "erroneous").
The problem is later where the Appeals court did not consider whether or note Blackboard's patent was wholely discardable because they did NOT rule as to whether or not the single login multiple role functionality is OBVIOUS or not.
Prior art anyone?
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Because, as most /. readers tend to believe, "information wants to be free"
When information isn't free, neither are you.
blackboard is horrible (Score:2)
The fact that anyone pays to use their software saddens me. It's absolutely awful. They're making a killing too. It's becoming the standard educational institution package, mostly because all the other universities use it. Their "clustering" solution is an absolute joke. They just recently started supporting 64-bit jvm's. That means that until recently if you wanted to scale, you had to launch multiple 1GB VM's and load balance requests yourself. The frequency, severity and apathy of the bugs is stun
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Just wait until you want to start doing serious Moodle development! It may be better than Bb but it's still awful.
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Which makes me wonder -- why is it that LMSs in general seem to suck so much? I mean, the basic functionality isn't hard; it's the kind of thing that lots of database-driven web apps do. It seems to me that most schools would be better off paying some junior- and senior-level CS students to roll their own than using pretty much any of the prepackaged "solutions," whether proprietary or OSS. Are there hidden complexities that I'm just not seeing? Can anyone who's ever worked on an LMS explain what some o
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At my institution, we went for a 3rd part closed source solution because said 3rd party could be relied on for support and also held more responsible for shortcomings than grad student
Typical 'cutting off your nose to spite your face' pointy-haired boss thinking.
Tell me, how well has that 'corporate responsibility' worked out for you? Is it really better than having cheap grad student labor on hand? I doubt it.
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Here's an obvious one- how's your web application's Arabic support? You do have a full UI translation in Arabic, right? Also Russian, Chinese and Japanese? Professors teaching those courses want their sites in those languages. Moodle has language packs for 81 different languages
SCORM/IMS support is another one- the specs are detailed and exacting, but without it you can't access a lot of prepackaged stuff.
I recently read a brief code
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Ah, full-scale language support is an aspect I hadn't thought of, and yeah, I can see how that would add a lot of complexity. Thanks; that's the kind of specific problem I was looking for.
As for SCORM, at first glance I have to say that it looks like an absurdly complex specification for something that ought to be a lot simpler. Which is a problem not unique to LMSs, of course.
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Full-scale language support isn't that much more difficult. All it takes is making sure there are no plaintext strings in your html output - every UI string is run through the translation engine (and cached). Strings in the translation table typically look like, "{0} days remaining" - then you just roll the entire table out to a third party (or volunteers) who can translate.
For RTL languages, you may need to include an additional stylesheet or two.
The hard part is converting an app with tons of static strin
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Well, I worked on modifying CMS for a while, and it's basically the same situation. I'd say that it's a combination of feature creep and the absence of a bulletproof framework.
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It's not all that difficult to set up a system where you log in, click on a course to launch it, and the course communicates with the LMS. That's only one small part of the LMS though, there are a lot of managerial things to set up also.
I've worked for the same company for the past 7 years, the core business of the company is producing online training courses but when I started we did have an LMS also that we built. At the time it was on version 5, and had started as a research project for Intel in 1998.
Good call (Score:5, Funny)
Somebody tried to patent the blackboard?
Now THERE's a stretch...
Documenting it on swpat.org (Score:2)
If anyone wants to help, I'm documenting this on en.swpat.org/wiki/Blackboard_inc. [swpat.org]
Dead company walking (Score:4, Interesting)
You know when some company with a totally crap product starts looking at their patent portfolio for survival...you know, like SCO...that they don't have much going for them. Instead of putting that time and money into making their products better, they put their best efforts into litigation. You know that's a red flag for any company.
Can we please trade eastern district of Texas back to Mexico? That court is a plague on business and an anchor on innovation.
Scribd? Gee, thanks. (Score:5, Funny)
Or if scribd is insufficiently annoying, we can print it out with an old 40 chars-per-line dot matrix, onto toasted wholemeal bread. We can then supply a strong lamp, a pen, and some blank bread for use as notepaper whilst you attempt to decipher it.
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No, that's fine, thank you. ScribD IS sufficiently annoying.
Can someone remind me why those kind of sites which gather docs and make then absolutely unreadable exist?
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Or if scribd is insufficiently annoying, we can print it out with an old 40 chars-per-line dot matrix, onto toasted wholemeal bread. We can then supply a strong lamp, a pen, and some blank bread for use as notepaper whilst you attempt to decipher it.
I don't know why this is moderated "Funny" -- it's one of the most "Insightful" posts I've read on /. today.
Scribd is complete slow, buggy, poorly-thought-out garbage.
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Scribd is complete slow, buggy, poorly-thought-out garbage.
Oh shit. Blackboard's gonna sue THEM next.
Their own prior art (Score:2)
Now ignore the othe companies prior art.
My question: Blackboard created (in 1999) some software and then later merged that company (their original company) into blackboard (seems like they just wanted to incorporate with a better name) and absorbed the patents. Given the patents are now owned by blackboard - I don't understand how their own prior art could invalidate them? Couldn't they sue based on that prior art? This one eludes
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I believe that prior art has to be listed for a variety of reasons. I'm pretty sure that one of them is to limit the scope and duration of that portion of any new patent that includes that same (?) feature. To not list prior art that they themselves own is kind of like trying to get a free (and faudulent) extension to the previous patent.
(Kind of like expecting the warranty on your old stere
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Prior art is not "somebody patented it already". Prior art is "somebody published it already".
If I publish a description of a new invention, then five years later decide I'd like to patent it because it's making money, I'm too late. My own published description from five years previously is prior art.
So Blackboard publish software embodying an "invention". Several years later they patent that "invention". The original software is prior art and invalidates the patent.
Claims 39-44 enforceable? (Score:2)
They still have claims 39-44 and those are enforceable? What! Those are dependent claims. You break the parent and the dependent ones fall apart. At least that's what I was always told. Am I wrong on that or do they just want to keep hope alive?
Case Study: CUNY 2009 (Score:5, Informative)
Consider this headline: "Blackboard Breakdown: CUNY in a 'Very Difficult Box to Get Out of' After Online Centralization Plan Backfires". (CUNY, City University of New York, third-largest university system in the US, 21 campuses).
"Blackboard 8 had never been used at a university close to the size of CUNY, where it has 130,000 users including 8,000 faculty members. When the semester started, Blackboard buckled under the load, which peaked at 35,000 users every three hours during peak activity. Sporadic Blackboard service during the first weeks of the semester meant many students could not submit their assignments, take quizzes or stay in contact with their instructors."
http://www.indypendent.org/2009/06/12/blackboard_breakdown/ [indypendent.org]
The problem isn't Bb (Score:2, Interesting)
Thank the GODS! (Score:2)
Now lets roll out some competition, so that those assholes at Blackboard can stop coding like they're blindfolded...
Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry that you guys don't like it, but it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas.
As a capitalist, I wholeheartedly agree. As a citizen, I disagree with the government's grant of exclusive rights on something as nebulous as a software algorithm (as opposed to a specific implementation of that algorithm). Make money off your ideas all you want. I do! Just don't expect to make money of the sole act of having thought them.
Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:4, Insightful)
Seconded. The problem with patents is not their exclusivity. It's not the people get to make money from their ideas. The problem is that people get exclusive rights to make money off commonplace ideas that anyone faced with the problem would think of. This should not happen. Patents are allegedly only available for novel and non-obvious inventions. The problem is that obvious inventions are being granted patents.
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So no one can copyright 'a flat surface conducive to writing' but if someone produces a mathematical method to determine if a number is prime (instantly) that deserves a copyright.
I'm sorry, but you're talking out your ass. The whole goal of patents and copyrights is to benefit society by virtue of granting a little incentive for inventors to publish their findings. I'm glad that Leibniz and Newton didn't patent their methods for computing the rate of change of motion, or we'd be having this conversation via quill-pen-on-parchment tied to carrier pigeons.
I'll simplify this since it seems to be above you: you can't patent math, nor should you. Algorithms are math. Combining algori
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Copyright....patent....not the same...ah, feel the ignorance. It's like the sweet smell of warm piss.
Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:5, Insightful)
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The sad fact is that patents have become such a big industry of their own, and the effect of a patent is no longer the rights provided by the patent itself, instead it's true power is its means of unleashing prohibitively expensive legal pressure upon others.
Multi-billion dollar corporations stand to lose millions on a product they market to the entire country due to an upstart company serving a smaller region. The larger company has nothing to lose by spending millions arguing a stretched scope of the pat
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And the distinction between those two things is....?
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I have no problem with people making money. When they try to make money with ideas that aren't theirs, or ideas that are so ridiculously obvious or broad, then I have a problem.
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When they try to make money with ideas that aren't theirs, or ideas that are so ridiculously obvious or broad, then I have a problem.
I have no problem with someone trying to make money with an idea that isn't theirs. If they make a better mousetrap, even if they didn't think of it, they should be able to profit off that. Also, if someone can find a good way to make money even off obvious ideas, I'm all for that too. It's when they try to do things in the court system with no intention of actually producing anything that I have issues.
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I think the drug company idea is a better example. It costs many millions of dollars to develop a new drug, put it through trials, get it appr
Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:4, Insightful)
Drug companies are a great example, and how patents should work. If it costs you half a billion dollars to bring the next wonder drug to market, we as a society have a vested interest in you making more than half a billion dollars back. We want you to be profitable, because we want you (and people like you) to keep producing wonder drugs. We provide legal protection to make you money because we want to provide you with an incentive to invest time and money.
The parasitic case that gets everyone's back up is when some guy gets a simple idea, often one that either 1,000 people already had and didn't patent because it was trivial and not patent worthy, and patents it. There is no societal benefit to giving a pot of gold to the first person to think of something when -anyone- faced with the same problem would design a substantially similar solution at a cost of next to nothing. Beneficial things that cost nearly nothing to think up will continue to be produced because they're part of doing your job or running your business.
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Drug companies are a great example, and how patents should work. If it costs you half a billion dollars to bring the next wonder drug to market, we as a society have a vested interest in you making more than half a billion dollars back. We want you to be profitable, because we want you (and people like you) to keep producing wonder drugs. We provide legal protection to make you money because we want to provide you with an incentive to invest time and money.
What is the point if we as a society (ie almost eve
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Which very quickly becomes a question of which is a better engine for innovation: private industry or government?
The profit motive, however much it offends some purists's instincts, works. Drug companies will create the drugs that make a lot of money. Why do they make a lot of money? Because a lot of people want them, implying they treat a condition that a lot of people have, and because people are willing to pay a lot of money for them, meaning they're for a condition people really want treated. Capita
Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time there's a patent article on slashdot, the summary and comments all just ooze with thinly-veiled contempt for our free market system.
In what way are government-granted monopolies considered a "free market"? It seems kinda like the opposite.
it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas.
An if you're actually competent, you can do that without crippling all your potential competitors and causing net harm to the economy.
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I'm sorry that you guys don't like it, but it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas. Wanting to make lots of money is at the core of our system. You aren't going to change that.
You are kidding right. Do you really think someone who is intellectually honest, and it isn't biased, and with two fingers of intelligence will agree with something like this:
A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are...
You are kidding right. Do you know how vague this "idea" is, and how many possibilities it range? Do you really think this is an original idea, or the natural way technology evolve. Maybe they can also patent networks on the moon since we probably are going there and will need networks.
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for f's sake - can't you actually link to the anti-capitalist post you're criticising? Then I can really slag you off.
Also, try to not post with AC if you're posting obvious flamebait - it makes it a lot harder for us sane people to hunt you down and overload you with derision each time you post ever again.
So, 'free market' is a pretty basic description of the s**t hole we are living in - you make it sound like cartels and "big government" don't exist --- but they do.
Where's the supply and demand in Bollock
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I'm sorry, but it's absolutely not, and you're quite socially impaired for allowing yourself to believe it. Capitalism and corporations, whatever they have grown into, were created to boost SOCIETAL improvements. Do you really think society sat down and thought, "OK, we want John to be much richer than Sarah"? No amount of posting that it's OK will help you to justify your s
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it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas
It's okay for people to want to make money off just about anything, including sitting on their asses all day reading /.
However, We The People are not obligated to provide them with legal avenues for doing so.
In the specific case of "making money off ideas" -- no. Ideas are cheap. I have ideas all the time. Most of them are clearly silly and impractical, some of them seem to make some sense, and a few would probably be useful (and lucrative) if I put
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but it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas.
Yes, but it is NOT OK for people to want to make money off other people's ideas. And that is why the Slashdot community is so sour on companies like Blackboard.
It's people like you and companies like Blackboard that are "anti-capitalist".
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The real problem is that the US patent system is anti-capitalist. It's way too easy to get a bullshit patent where there's clearly prior art or the so-called innovation is entirely trivial. This allows any fool who can afford a patent layer to amass a portfolio of bullshit patents. Once the patents have been issued, they're valid US patents, and the owner of the patents can use them to get an injunction to block competition. In order to get the patent overturned, the competitor will need to go to court and
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Pfff.. You think there's much anti-capitalism? No there isn't. Not even enough of it.
We're soaking in capitalism and marketing and shit every day, here on slashdot and most everywhere else. Freemarketism is the fucking baseline of human culture in the west.
Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes slashdot is anti-capitalist to some degree. Slashdot users are in general pretty interested in freedom issues. You'll find a pretty big support for the free market, but far less support for some of the capitalistic ideas that aren't based around the free market. Intellectual property being an example of that.
The best argument for copyright and patents is basically that atleast it should ensure that stuff is invented and created, however costly it is to society otherwise. But when you see the current capitalistic exploitations going on, even that argument starts to lose its colors. And you are basically left with the argument that it is capitalistic to assign ownership to everything. An arugment that simply isn't productive nor seen as inherently true by those who use their brains.
I do find slashdotters resistance to specifically software patents somewhat telling though. Software patents aren't really special. They just affect most people here directly. You can't get anything done if you have to watch out for patent mindfields? Well, that is exactly how people feel in other fields also. Reality is colored by your point of view.